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Texas bums on seats

Cinemas in the Houston area are a thing of wonder, according to my ICIS colleagues there. For years I have been hearing of a cinema complex in Katy, Texas, just outside Houston, which not only has wide reclining seats, but also tables in front of the seats where waitresses bring you a meal while you’re watching the film. Fantastic.

Cinemas everywhere have become vastly more comfortable, but theatres and opera houses, not to mention economy (coach) airline seats, have been slow to keep up. The hard narrow seats in the upper wings of London theatres, where you fight your neighbour for the armrest, are agony even for this snake-hipped Blog.

For those broader of beam, the new recently opened Dallas opera house has been designed by the Norman Foster architectural practice with maximum comfort in mind. During the design process, the architects reduced the number of seats from 3,300 to 2,200.

The architects said that they had found that, like many things in Texas, “the opera-going bottoms that would fill them are broader than they used to be,” according to an article in Private Eye.